by
Boulevard, a poetic journey forged amid the crucible of the COVID-19 pandemic, encapsulates a year of the poet's life confined to working from home due to travel restrictions to Australia and Ireland, his cherished homelands.
Comprising 76 sections, this collection beckons readers into a nuanced exploration of the extraordinary events unfolding on a boulevard and its neighboring surroundings during this unprecedented time.
Is it a book-length poem or a collection of 76 standalone works? That decision rests with you, the reader.
Step into Boulevard, where the local becomes a tapestry of universal resonance, and the poet's journey becomes yours to traverse.
Cassandra Atherton, poet and critic, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University wrote:'Boulevard achieves a poet's holy mission to elevate and preserve the times one lives in with starkly rich, elegant, Hopper-like vignettes unfolding over time in the micro-view outside his window of one stretch of an American street while hunkering down during the initial period of the Covid-19 pandemic. The everyday is made new and unusual; the seemingly mundane, extraordinary. O'Reilly reminds us that poetry is the alchemy that give us light, even from the darkest moments in the human experience.'
With irrepressible ingenuity, Nathanael O'Reilly employs the poem as fragment to explore his neighbourhood's resilience in the jittery and ludic rhythm of life during the pandemic. Highly attentive and closely focused, Boulevard is a superbly crafted and questing poeticization of the hyperlocal-exploring the daily and seasonal tempi of the suburban and the quotidian. Boulevard is razor sharp; it is testimony, celebration and elegy.
